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Jason Campbell, quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, cancels his Caribbean nuptials with fiancée Jenny Montes, hours before she walks down the aisle. The 162 guest ceremony and reception in Montes’ home country of the Dominican Republic, planned publicly through interviews and tweets by the couple, was cancelled this past weekend with no plans as of yet for the future.

Montes, the single mother and former nightclub hostess and Campbell met in 2005 at a bar in D.C. during Campbell’s days as a Washington Redskin. The two were friends for several years before reconnecting in 2010 and then getting engaged on New Year’s Eve of the same year. The couple openly discussed their upcoming wedding divulging details such as their large, 23 person bridal party. The then bride-to-be would regularly ‘tweet’ about buying her wedding dress as well as other wedding details.

Since news of the cancelled wedding broke, Campbell appears to be trying to calm the waters. In a statement to The Washington Post, Campbell states, “We’re not trying to force anything right now. We’re taking everything one day at a time, trying to let all the air and the dust clear.”

In response to sources claiming that the football star left his fiancée at the altar Campbell tells The Washington Post, “I love her enough not to leave her at the altar. I love her enough to talk to her before it gets that far.”

Although details of the breakup are still unknown, the couple still must enjoy each other’s company as both are still together in the Dominican with their families, treating their time there as just a big family vacation.

An unidentified metal object that could have come from a space rocket caused a huge commotion when it fell to earth at a small town in northern Brazil, the press said Friday.

The spherical object, which weighs about 30 kilos (66 pounds) and has a diameter of 1 meter (3 1/4 feet), was found Wednesday in a rural area of the town of Anapurus.

“The noise I heard made me weak in the knees. I went to see what it was. I thought it was an airplane that had crashed, or an earthquake,” resident Jose Valdir Mendes told the news Web site G1.

He said the object fell to Earth just 6 meters (20 feet) from his home and that the impact left a 1-meter (3 1/4-foot) hole.

Local residents came pouring out of their houses to see what had happened and alerted their neighbors in the nearby village of Mata Roman, who were equally shaken by the event.

“There was an enormous disturbance here. Some were afraid it might have something to do with that 2012 story,” Mata Roma resident Max Mauro Garreto said, alluding to the supposed Mayan prediction that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012.

“Others said it was an alien. But I think it’s a piece of a satellite that fell from space,” the schoolteacher said.

Meanwhile, astrophysicist Gustavo Rojas of the Sao Carlos Federal University said that only scientific analysis will determine exactly what it is, but said that a similar piece fell on Uganda in 2002 that came from the European satellite launch rocket Ariane 4.

“It’s highly probable that it’s the helium tank from the Ariane 4 rocket that was launched in 1997. Its return to the atmosphere was scheduled for the morning of (February) 22, according to the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies”, Rojas was cited as saying by the online news site UOL.

In August 2010, Ute Linhart, a German fashion executive says she was pushed in front of a oncoming subway train in New York.

The man shown in surveillance footage of the horrifying ordeal was 26-year-old Jose Rojas, a cook at Cipriani’s.

Though Rojas is clearly the man in the footage, he maintained that he did not intentionally push her onto the tracks, his lawyers claiming he drunkenly tripped, fell, and knocked into her. Witnesses stated that just before Linhart was pushed onto the tracks, Rojas was wandering around the platform glaring at people. Immediately after the incident, Rojas was arrested and, as a point of reference, his blood-alcohol level was found to be twice the legal limit to drive.

As a result of the incident, Linhart’s jaw, cheek bone, shoulder, forearm, several teeth, and eight ribs were broken. She also suffered a collapsed lung.

Friday, a jury acquitted Rojas of attempted murder but instead found him guilty of first-degree assault. However, the conviction while a lesser charge, still carries the same possible sentence of 5 to 25 years in prison.

Rojas’ lawyer stated that what happened was an accident, and that his client should not be punished for an accident, no matter what the outcome.

Jose Baez, officially withdrew from Casey Anthony’s legal team this week according to the Orange County Clerk of Courts website. As of today, no other attorney has replaced Baez.

Baez , an attorney from Florida, became nationally known after defending Casey Anthony. Since winning this case, Baez now faces two Florida Bar Association complaints. According to the Orlando Sentinel one of the complaints involves his failure to share discovery information with the prosecution as the trial was upcoming.

Since her victory in court, Anthony has been publicly starting her new life; releasing photographs and videos of things such as a new nose piercing, hairstyle and her dog. However she has yet to mention her deceased daughter, Caylee Anthony, in any of these videos. She is currently living at an undisclosed location in Florida while on probation for her check fraud conviction.

Baez, although now off the Casey Anthony defense team, is a senior partner in his Kissimmee, Florida law firm.

Law enforcement in Los Angeles officials are now asking any additional victims or anyone with information about any sexual abuse at the hands of a soccer coach to come forward.

Wednesday, a Los Angeles County district attorney alleged that 48-year-old soccer coach Javier Arrioja molested a teenager on the team he coached four times from May to November of 2011.

The victim was a member of the under-17 club known as the Los Angeles Misioneros, an all-boys team.

The 48-year-old, who has been coaching in the area for 15 years, has been charged with four counts of lewd acts on a minor and one count of providing harmful matter to a minor.

Fearing there may be additional victims, deputies have asked anyone with any information about the case to contact the police.

The molestation is said to have occurred in Arrioja’s car at Obregon Park as well as in his home, both in East Los Angeles.

In a news release, the Special Victims Bureau of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had this to say:

On February 17, 2012, Special Victims Bureau detectives contacted and arrested the suspect at his home in the 100 block of N. Townsend Ave, East Los Angeles without incident. The suspect was transported and booked at the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s Station, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He is being held on $300,000.00 bail. ...
Sheriff’s Special Victims Bureau detectives believe it is possible there are additional victims and urge anyone who may have been a victim to contact investigators. If you have any information concerning the suspect please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Special Victims Bureau at 1-877-710-LASD (5273) or specialvictims@lasd.org (Habalamos Espanol).

Chilean and Peruvian officials are worrying about the recent heavy rainfall that is causing landmines to travel to more populated areas as they are being swept away by the water and mud caused by flooding rivers.

As a precaution, the border of the two Latin American countries has been closed as landmines have been washing up on the roads.

In Chile, four mines have already been purposefully detonated by a highway that links it with Peru. That highway is heavily traveled as it is the used for trade between the two countries.

It has been predicted that Peru may experience one of the wettest summers in its history.

Armando Bigo, a second grader, shot in the shoulder Tuesday evening while shopping with his mother at a nearby bodega somehow remembered his manners.

Armando and his mother, Ely Flores, were shopping for candy in Papa Yala’s Deli on Randall Ave. near Lawrence Ave. in Soundview when an unidentified gunman on a bicycle fired a shot into an outside crowd around 8 p.m. Tuesday. The shot hit the young boy standing near a rack of potato chips inside the store.

Amidst screams and chaos in the store, Armando kept his cool as he calmed his mother and walked towards the store manager, Mahmood Abdulrub. Abdulrub describes the scene, “I heard screaming. The mom cried for her son. I see this cute little boy walking over slowly – holding his shoulder.”

According to Abdulrub, the boy sat down while the store manager tried to help stop the bleeding. “He was so polite. He looked up at me with his big googly eyes and said, ‘Thank you, sir.’”

As of Wednesday, Armando was still being treated at Jacobi Medical Center. His injuries include a punctured lung, fractured rib, as well as an injured spinal cord. The second grader will still have to undergo a variety of tests as he continues to recover and will be hospitalized for some time.

Today, NY Police Commissioner said the shooter had been IDed and an arrest was to be announced soon. The Commissioner said the teen shooter is a known gang member that was feuding with a rival gang with Armando was shot.

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The day before the United Nations voted to denounce Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad for his violent response to the recent Syrian uprising, Hugo Chávez was sending his own message to Syria in the form of fuel according to reports from The New York Times.

A Venezuelan ship called, the Negra Hipólita, named after Simón Bolívar’s wet nurse and nanny, arrived in Baniyas, a Syrian port. This is the second trip for this ship to Baniyas after it carried fuel to aid President Assad this past December. It is believed that both shipments likely contained different types of fuel.

According to the chief executive, John H. Paskin, of the London based satellite tracking company, Commodity Flow, the ship left a Venezuelan refinery on January 25th. According to the P.D.V.S.A or Petróleos de .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) website, this refinery at Puerto La Cruz is known for its production of diesel, jet fuel, gasoline as well as other fuel components. Paskin also states that tracking data shows that this ship made another trip this past fall arriving in the Syrian port on December 1st.

The oil shipment has created an international stir. Yet, such controversy is nothing new for President Chávez. Just last month he supported Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amidst claims that Iran was producing dangerous nuclear weapons.

Yet, when asked about the alleged oil shipments, Chávez defiantly responded with his own questions. “Have we by any chance asked the United States what it does with the fuel we sell to the United States? Have we by any chance allowed anyone to impose conditions on our sale of petroleum to the United States?” Chávez stated that the answer was no and then said, “We are a free country.”

It is well known that Venezuela and Chávez have benefited from the sale of oil. He has also been known to use this oil as a way to endorse his own interests abroad. Cuba has exchanged doctors for oil with Venezuela in the past, while China is also a large buyer of Venezuela’s oil. Chávez has also back Middle Eastern countries such as Iran causing an even larger divide between the South American country and the United States.

It is still unclear how these actions will affect Chávez politically in his own country. The leader finds himself in a personal battle with cancer as well as a political battle with the popular opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

Wednesday night, Gabriella Cortez, 42, was arrested on suspicion of two felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. The case against her adds to the growing list of allegations of sexual misconduct between teachers and students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Cortez’s arrests makes the seventh in the last month alone.

The Los Angeles Spanish teacher from Montebello was arrested after a student went to the police claiming he had a sexual relationship with Cortez from 2008 to 2010 while he was a student at Roosevelt High School.

The 18-year-old student went to police last week and during interviews mentioned a second student’s name. While speaking with police, the second student said he had sex with Cortez at her home. Both students have since graduated, though at the time of the alleged sexual encounters, they were both minors.

Cortez was released on $140,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on March 22. She has also been put on administrative leave.

Cuban President Raul Castro met here with two members of a visiting delegation of U.S. lawmakers, Communist Party daily Granma said Friday.

Castro received Sens. Patrick Leahy and Richard Shelby on Thursday night to discuss “subjects of interest to Cuba and the United States,” the daily said in a brief article.

Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, while Shelby, who represents Alabama, is the ranking Republican on the banking committee.

Cuba’s official press published a photo of the meeting but gave no details about the U.S. delegation’s agenda.

The visit came several days after the date marking half a century since Washington’s economic and trade embargo on Havana went into effect, one of the principal sources of conflict between the two countries.

Other heated topics of their bilateral political dispute include the case of the U.S. contractor serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba for subversion, and five Cuban agents jailed in the United States on charges of espionage.

Alan Gross was arrested in Havana on Dec. 3, 2009, in possession of satellite communications equipment he said he was planning to distribute among Cuba’s Jewish community.

Havana says he was illegally aiding dissidents and inciting subversion on the Communist-ruled island. Last August, Cuba’s highest court upheld the 15-year jail sentence imposed on Gross five months earlier.

Gross, now 62, was in Cuba as an employee of a Maryland firm contracted by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The “Cuban Five” - Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez - were arrested by the FBI in 1998 and convicted three years later by a federal jury in Miami.

Though one of the group, Rene Gonzalez, completed his custodial sentence last October and was released, he has not been permitted to go home, as the federal courts say he must serve his three-year probation on U.S. soil.

The Cuban government insists it has repeatedly conveyed to Washington its readiness to find a “reciprocal humanitarian” solution to the Gross case.

In December Raul Castro received the head of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., the Rev. Michael Kinnamon, who brought up the subject of Gross at the meeting and said that Cuba should consider the humanitarian aspects of the case.

The Cuban president on several occasions has shown himself willing to hold talks with the United States, but on a basis of equality and without conditions, while at the same time criticizing Washington’s “resistance to change” and “lack of political will.”

A father who was deported to Mexico has a little more hope now after thousands of people signed a petition to slow the court case that could conceivably keep him from his children.

A petition was created on Valentine’s Day urging the Department of Social Services in Allegheny County in North Carolina to not permanently separate Felipe Montes from his three sons.

The more than 20,000 people who signed the petition, which is on Presente.org, insist that Montes be reunited with his children in either the U.S. or in Mexico.

Montes, was deported in 2011 and Allegheny County DSS began working to terminate his parental rights for his U.S. citizen children.

After tens of thousands of people signed the petition, the hearing to terminate Montes’ parental right, which was scheduled for Tuesday was postponed, giving the family more time.

Though postponing the hearing was a great feat, Colorlines reporter Seth Freed Wessler wrote:

We don’t yet know what the child welfare system will do when the hearing does occur, but the postponement is a sign that the media attention on the case interrupted the child welfare department’s plan to move the children toward adoption. The family is by no means in the clear and the Allegheny County could certainly still try to have Felipe’s parental rights terminated but for now, Montes is doing everything necessary so that his children can be reunified with him.

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The scientists trying to develop a vaccine to prevent heroin addiction are almost ready to begin human clinical trials, Mexico’s Juan Ramon de la Fuente National Psychiatric Institute said.

Tests of the medication on animals have achieved “significant advances related to the time in which the subjects remain immunized,” the institute’s head of epidemiological and psychosocial research, Dr. Maria Elena Medina-Mora, told a press conference here.

Rats that became addicted to heroin after being allowed to ingest as much of the drug as they wanted began to consume less of it once they received the vaccine, she said, describing the results as “very encouraging.”

The vaccine blocks the pleasure-inducing effect of heroin by preventing the drug from breaching the blood-brain barrier, Medina-Mora said.

If the medication works on humans, she said, it “will be administered to people who have a serious addiction.”

The institute’s 15-year-long effort to develop the vaccine was financed largely by the Mexican government and received technical support from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, she said.

Mexico’s health ministry announced earlier this month that it had obtained a U.S. patent for the anti-addiction medication.

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U.S. Attorney Robert E. O’Neill announces today that U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday sentenced Neiser Guerrero-Jimenez (33, Colombia, South America) to 235 months in federal prison for conspiring with others to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine on board vessels subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Guerrero-Jimenez pled guilty on December 5, 2011.

According to court documents, in 2009 and 2010, Guerrero-Jimenez recruited, paid, managed, and dispatched mariners engaged in smuggling large quantities of cocaine using stateless self-propelled semi-submersible (SPSS) vessels, in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Guerrero-Jimenez began as a mariner on similar, successful maritime cocaine smuggling trips earlier in the last decade, and worked his way up, eventually becoming a dispatcher and manager for the organization.

The United States Coast Guard interdicted three SPSS vessels dispatched by Guerrero-Jimenez. These interdictions took place on May 6, 2009, July 28, 2009 and August 11, 2009, after each vessel departed the Mayorquin-area along Colombia’s southern coast, and entered international waters.

Guerrero-Jimenez was arrested in Colombia by Colombian authorities on June 16, 2010. He was extradited to the United States on September 22, 2011.